


In Shadows

by ReyloTrashCompactor (NextToSomething)



Category: Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: F/M, Fairy Tale Elements, Fairy Tale Retellings, Jedi Training, Keeping the Stars Apart, Reylo Fanfiction Anthology, Romance, Sex In A Cave, bless, east of the sun and west of the moon retelling, of course it is, sort of, which is already a tag
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-09-30
Updated: 2016-09-30
Packaged: 2018-08-18 15:25:17
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,129
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8166673
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/NextToSomething/pseuds/ReyloTrashCompactor
Summary: It was when the figure in black ignited his lightsaber--a weapon she had thought was a dangerous thing of myths, nothing more--that Rey knew she would be leaving Jakku. She had always imagined it would be in the company of her family, and not to save a young scavenger even more starved than her.
“What use could a man in a mask and a ship that costs more than the entirety of Jakku have with a scavenger?”
“I have no use for a scavenger, just for the girl called Rey.”
“How could you possibly know about me? I’m no one.”
“We’ll see.”





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [SouthSideStory](https://archiveofourown.org/users/SouthSideStory/gifts).



> Written as a part of the Reylo Fanfiction anthology, this is a retelling of ~~the first part of~~ East of the Sun and West of the Moon. Thanks to the mods for looking this over for me and making sure it was the best it could be. Thanks also to my wonderful beta, SouthSideStory for being the absolute best in all things.

“Three thousand credits for her, and not one less.”

Unkar Plutt’s phlegmy voice reached Rey as she was hunched over a tub, scouring her latest find. She scrubbed all the harder at the alternator, not wanting to hear the selling of another young thing for a handful of credits. Though three thousand was a pretty steep price, even for a crook like Plutt. She turned, morbid fascination winning out, to see Plutt out from behind his counter, puffing out his chest and trying to seem taller as he dealt with…

The figure opposite him was tall and garbed in all black. A strange choice in the desert. He moved aside a panel of his cloak and rested a gloved hand on something at his belt. She couldn’t see his face.

“Let me see her.”

His voice sounded like no voice at all, mechanical and clunking. Rey set the alternator aside, turning fully to face the scene behind her.

Plutt’s eyes darted to the side and caught a glimpse of Rey. His gaze narrowed as if trying to tell her something. _Stay put._

“Money first,” he said as he turned back to the man in black. The dark figure unlatched a strange looking weapon from his belt and rolled his shoulders. Plutt spoke again. “No need for that. I’ll fetch her.”

Plutt moved more quickly than she had ever seen and snatched a small girl from behind the tarp of his portions station. Rey recognized her as one of Plutt’s most recent acquisitions, Sama. Young and perpetually red-skinned from the sun. Not worth three thousand credits, even though it turned Rey’s stomach to reduce the girl’s worth to so many coins.

“This is Rey,” Plutt said, cutting his eyes to Rey, the real Rey, and giving her that meaningful look again. _Keep quiet._ “She’s my best scavenger, so you’ll have to pay extra if you want her. Three and a half thousand.”

It was when the figure in black ignited his lightsaber-- _a weapon she had thought was a dangerous thing of myths, nothing more_ \--that she knew she would be leaving Jakku. She had always imagined it would be in the company of her family, _finally, finally_ , and not to save a young scavenger even more starved than her.

“Stop!” she yelled, and stepped between Plutt and the towering figure, sword spitting at his side. She cared not a lick for the safety of Plutt, but the little girl behind him was shaking in fear. “He’s lying,” Rey said, looking hard at the junk dealer. The cruel twist of Plutt’s spit-slicked lips told her that whatever happened here today, she would be sorry for it.

“I know.” The rusted-gear voice sounded behind her, and she turned toward him.

Rey gasped. He was so large, towering and massive, that she had to tilt back her head to see him entirely, even though she herself could never be called petite. The hulking form was draped in relentless black and it drew the eye, like the insistent pull of a dying star. Tucked beneath his hood wasn’t a face, but rather a black glass-and-metal mask. More skull than anything else. He spoke again.

“The girl I’ve heard so much about.”

Rey opened her mouth to ask exactly what he had heard and from whom when the masked man began to extend a heavy pouch of credits to Plutt with his free hand. Rey reached out and stopped him, looking up into his mask. She didn’t know how to appeal to someone whose face she couldn’t see, but she straightened her shoulders and tried all the same.

“Don’t.” The masked man lurched toward her and she had to fight from taking a step back. “I’d rather be bought for nothing than to see Plutt benefit.”

Rey felt a strange nudge just behind the bridge of her nose, and suddenly she was thinking of the last time Plutt shorted her on portions. She’d yelled at him, her patience worn thin after so many days without a decent meal. She’d managed to negotiate an only slightly higher trade. He’d slid the additional portions across the counter to her, and Rey saw little Sama back in the dark recesses of Plutt’s Concession Stand. She’d licked her chapped little lips and watched the portions disappear into Rey’s bag. Rey’s growling stomach had turned when Plutt drew her attention again with a few oily words:

_“That’s my girl.”_

Rey shook the memory from her head, not entirely sure why she had thought of it at all. The man in black lowered his hand with the credits and canted his head at Rey, considering her. He pushed her easily aside and strode to where Plutt stood. The masked man moved Plutt’s massive form as easily as he had moved Rey, and crouched, handing the heavy pouch to Sama.

The girl hesitated before taking the bag, wide eyes fixed on the still lit saber in his hand. As soon as Sama had tucked away the pouch, the man stood, crowding Plutt and raising his saber uncomfortably close to the Blobfish in the little space between them.

“If anything happens to the girl once I leave, _Plutt,_ I will know about it.”

He turned quickly away, leading Rey to follow him with a soft touch to her elbow. She could see his great black ship in the distance and felt the first tremors of fear. She was leaving Jakku. She was leaving with a man in a mask and had no way of knowing whether she would ever find her family now. But she thought again of Sama, of what fear that little girl might feel as she walked toward the great black ship gleaming in the Jakku sun, and she knew that even if her family never found her, they would have been proud of her bravery.

They had just made it from under the shade of Plutt’s large tent when the masked man spoke.

“Actually--” he said, with an odd sort of humor.

He turned quickly away and Rey watched with wide eyes as he stalked back into the tent. He raised his violent-red blade and the gathered crowd drew a collective, terrified breath as he brought it down on the sloping shoulder of Unkar Plutt, cleaving him into two grotesque and disproportionate halves.

* * *

 

_“What use could a man in a mask and a ship that costs more than the entirety of Jakku have with a scavenger?”_

_“I have no use for a scavenger, just for the girl called Rey.”_

_“How could you possibly know about me? I’m no one.”_

_“We’ll see.”_

* * *

 

They landed on a planet whose ground shifted underfoot more than the sands of Jakku. It was tepid and wet and Rey found herself regretting all those years of wishing for more water. Jakku had far too little, but this place-- _Dagobah--_ had far, far too much. A wet, sludging cough settled in her lungs in the half hour that it took them to reach their lodgings.

Rey didn’t know what to expect from this man in a mask, but given the luxury of his ship, the craggy, dripping cave he led her into was worse than no expectations at all. The man lit a few flickering candles and regarded her with a tilt of his head. She coughed and he straightened.

“You need time to acclimate to the humidity of Dagobah. Go rest.” He motioned to a damp pelt that hung over a small opening. She pulled it aside and saw a small, though tidy room fashioned from the very stone of the cave. There was a low pallet assembled on the far wall, consisting mostly of pillows and musty-looking throws. She walked over to it and settled carefully into it. It was dryer than she thought a pile of soft things would be on a planet covered in mist. It was absolute luxury compared to the sand covered scavenge in her abandoned home on Jakku.

He was standing in the crude doorway, holding the pelt aside. The flickering candlelight silhouetted his massive form, and he looked even more menacing than when he’d held a lit saber. A question, a fear, that had plagued her since he’d led her from Niima Outpost with a touch on her elbow bubbled to the surface. The pallet was certainly large enough for two, especially if they kept close. There was another tilt of his head and he looked over his shoulder to the larger room.

“I’ll sleep out here. You’re safe, Rey.” He turned from her, dropping the pelt and leaving her in the dark.

“Wait--”

He pulled the pelt back but said nothing.

“What’s your name?” she asked.

He seemed to consider this, as if he had more than one name and was deciding which to give her.

“I’m Kylo Ren,” was his halting, mechanical reply.

* * *

 

Rey was woken several hours later by a scream. She thought for a moment that she was still on Jakku, and a scavenger less fortunate than she was being taken for more than just their collected salvage. But a deep breath of damp air and the cough that followed reminded her of what had happened in the last several hours and that the scream was Kylo Ren’s.

She vaulted from her low pallet and blindly fumbled to the opening across the room. He’d extinguished the candles and she crashed into a low table. She picked over the spilled contents and finally found the crude flint Kylo Ren had used to light the candles. She only made a few faint sparks before he moaned in pain from the darkness.

“How--how do I--?”

His breathing was ragged and she only managed to create more sparks.

“Don’t--” he said, and she stopped dead at the sound of his voice.

“K-Kylo Ren?”

He groaned and the deep sound settled hard and heavy in her middle.

“I’m fine, Rey.”

His voice. At first it was her fear at the pained noises he was making that had set her heart to race, but now its tempo only increased at the low, affecting cadence of his voice undiluted by the mechanics of a mask. He sounded deliberate, as if he measured each word before uttering it, and her skin tightened into gooseflesh at the memory of her name shaped by this voice.

“How do I light the candles?”

She heard him shift in the dark and she felt absurdly breathless at the strange intimacy of him without his mask, so near her. In his bed. Had he taken off his clothes, as well? What did that broad back look like under all those yards of black fabric?

“Please don’t light the candles. I would prefer--I’m sorry I frightened you. I don’t sleep well on planets like this. I would rather you not see my face.”

This raised more questions than it answered, but Rey nodded into the dark, remembering too late that he likely could not see her.

“All right.” She heard him shift again, and she felt suddenly hot in the too-thick air of the dark cave. She coughed, a deep, sick sound. Kylo Ren groaned, as if her cough pained him as well.

“Please, go rest, Rey.”

She stood and stumbled over the fallen table. “I can’t see to get back…”

There was a heavy silence, and Rey realized the implications of her words. That she was asking to stay.

“Concentrate,” he said, and that voice bewitched her all over again. She wasn’t sure if she wanted instead to lower to her hands and knees and crawl her way to his pallet and the warm comfort of his words. “Concentrate on how the room feels around you, and you should make it to your bed without a misstep. I had meant to wait until tomorrow to begin your training in the Force, but now will have to do.”

“The Force?”

She felt a pulse in the air and swallowed any further questions.

“Concentrate,” he repeated, and she closed her eyes in compliance.

The room was no darker after she shut her eyes, but it helped her to feel more centered. She concentrated on the room, though she wasn’t really even sure what that meant. She remembered the way it looked in the low flickering light earlier, and took a halting step. She knew she must be in the middle of the strewn objects from the table she knocked over, but her foot met with uncluttered floor.

“Good, another step.”

She took one and another. She reached out her hand to feel for the far wall.

“No, Rey. Your mind only.”

Her breath caught in her throat at the sound of her name again spoken in sleep roughened syllables and she stumbled. She refocused, hands by her side, and took another step. Soon she felt that she was near the pelt that guarded her room from his, and reached out to move it to the side. The rest of the way to her bed was an easy journey, though when she settled into it, she felt none of its comfort from before. She wanted another word from Kylo Ren. One more dose of that aphotic voice.

“Goodnight, Rey,” he said, as if he knew, as if he had heard her. His voice was far away, too far, and she clutched the pillow beneath her head to keep from following it back through the dark.

* * *

 

She woke to the smell of food the next day. The light on this planet was filtered and green, and Rey found she didn’t know if it was morning or afternoon. She walked into the larger front room and found a plate loaded with greasy, cooked food--red-yolked eggs and bloody meat and something yellow and starchy. Her mouth watered. She sat down at the now righted table and ate the food in as careful and measured bites as possible.

Kylo Ren wasn’t in the cave and Rey was somewhat glad for it. When she finally managed to drift to sleep, his graveled voice had followed her under. She didn’t know why he affected her so deeply, other than the realization that the great black creature that stole her away from Jakku was only a man. Only a man who had bad dreams, just like her.

When he did appear, she was sopping up the remains of her breakfast with a crusty piece of bread. He was masked-- _of course he was--_ and waited patiently for her to finish. She stood once she had.

“How are you feeling this morning?” The clockwork burr of his voice was back and Rey found it difficult to keep her eyes focused on his mask.

She cleared her throat experimentally. “I’m doing better.”

He nodded and indicated for her to follow him out of the cave. “Good. We begin, then.”

* * *

 

They ate two meals in a day. A hearty, comforting breakfast before a long day out in the fetid swamps, and a much lighter, cleaner evening meal. By the second meal Rey was practically starved, and its promise was what motivated her through the strange trials of the day. She considered that Kylo Ren might be doing this on purpose.

He had her perform the most peculiar tasks. Stacking stones one on top of the other in impossibly high towers, encouraging her to _concentrate_ to keep them from toppling over. She did, though he didn’t name this concentration again. He’d called it the Force their first night on the planet, but he was less explicit now.

She carried out tasks she didn’t know the meaning behind, and it seemed she only had to perform them because they were supposed to be completed. She didn’t know why she was made to stand for hours on one hand, or why she knocked training droids out of the sky with her staff in strange, calculated strokes he called _forms_.

What was most confusing was that Kylo Ren seemed to not understand their meaning either. She would perform a task and look to him. He would only nod, and ask her to do it again, for longer, or faster. It was as if he were teaching someone else's lesson rather than his own. That he, too, didn’t understand the lesson’s importance.

At night, she would strain her ears for the faintest sound of him, but he was so silent in the room next to hers that she imagined he didn’t sleep at all.

* * *

 

They had been on Dagobah for almost a month when she was startled awake by his screams again. She used her newly keen awareness in the dark space to run quickly to him, stopping only short of his bed. His request that she leave the candles unlit was as fresh in her mind as if he’d only just voiced it, and she did not reach for the flint. She paused for a moment before reaching out to wake him. Her hand met with damp blanket over hot skin and his great, gloveless hand closed crushingly hard around her wrist.

She yelped and he released her, an apology quick on his lips. “I’m sorry, Rey. Did I hurt you?”

She shook her head, somehow knowing that he could feel rather than see her answer.

“You were screaming in your sleep again,” she said. She traced fingers over the tender flesh of her wrist, remembering the heat of his punishing grip. He said nothing, so she continued. “Does that always happen?”

Kylo Ren didn’t answer right away, and she thought he was considering lying to her. Telling her that he’d had almost a month of peaceful sleep, and that she should know that, rather than the harder truth that he had gone almost a month without sleeping to avoid whatever terror it kindled in him.

“It does,” he finally answered.

She didn’t know what to say, so she stood from where she crouched next to his bed. A strange hardness tightened in her throat as she did, and she quickly returned to the floor.

“I can stay,” she told the darkness, and she hoped he wouldn’t send her away.

He was quiet for a long moment, and Rey was beginning to regret her offer. “All right,” he finally said. “Let me--”

She didn’t wait for his offer of giving her his pallet and simply climbed in with him. It was startlingly hot and she realized he wore no shirt as her reaching hands met feverish flesh. He went rigid beneath her and she waited for the dismissal she prayed wouldn’t come. He shifted slowly, making room in front of him and pulling back the blankets. She could see nothing but the barest shifting of shapes, but she found that it didn’t matter. She fit easily into his bed and the warm crook of his body.

He was stiff and still beside her, his breaths coming in soft, shallow sips. He was making every effort to not touch her, and she ached at the sadness of this. With sure hands, she drew him around her, curling easily into his massive frame. She wrapped a heavy arm over her slight waist, and felt a thrill at how small he made her feel.

He relaxed by inches, his breath elongating after each passing moment. She liked the feel of him, the smothering heat of his bare skin. She wished that she was wearing less than she was, so that she might feel more of him. Rey shifted in his arms and turned to face him. Her trembling hands settled on the vast heat of his chest and she angled her head up, looking into the dark where his face would be.

Kylo Ren was lying very still, but she knew he wasn’t asleep.

“May I touch your face?” she asked, creeping her hands fractionally upwards, over the jut of his collarbones.

She wouldn’t touch him if he didn’t want her to, but she hoped, oh she hoped, that he would.

He moved against her, startling her as he wrapped his strong arms about her and pulled her closer to him. “Yes,” he answered, and he was close enough that she felt his breath on her face.

Now that she had the freedom to do so, Rey felt suddenly shy. As if she shouldn’t have asked, or if the new intimacy of him holding her was revelation enough. But she ran her hands further up nonetheless, feeling the flutter of his pulse at his neck. The roughness of short stubble at his jaw.

The wide fullness of his mouth.

She jerked her hands away, startled and entirely too hot now. She debated turning from him again and pretending she didn’t know these alluring secrets that his mask hid. But his hands shifted slightly on her back, pulling her that much closer, and her hands found his face again. His lips were parted beneath her fingers and she was tempted to slip a finger between them, discover the heat of his mouth. She let temptation rule her and slowly pushed inside. His tongue was impossibly hot as he licked a slow path from one knuckle to the next. His mouth closed around the digit and at his gentle sucking she finally lost her nerve. She pulled her hands from his mouth and trailed them farther up, leaving a slightly damp path up his cheek.

His eyes were closed and she felt the thick lashes that pressed firmly against his cheeks. He had a strong brow and--she gasped. His hair was thick and soft and much longer than she would expect from her serious teacher. Her own hair was brittle from continued exposure to the sun, but his felt slick and smooth beneath her fingers. He shuddered as she raked her fingers through it over and over, utterly fascinated by the texture. On a mad impulse, she tugged at the roots and he gripped her wrists as his shudders became a groan.

He pulled her hands from his hair and settled them again at his chest. Her heart was hammering as he pulled her into him, tucking her beneath his chin and wrapping her in the blanket. She didn’t want to be still; she wanted to hear him make that noise again.

But he just held her to him, and she eventually drifted into sleep. Her last conscious thought was that, by touch alone, he seemed far too beautiful for a life beneath a mask.

 

* * *

 

The next morning, her training changed.

He knocked over the pile of rocks and set the training droids aside. He handed her a heavy metal cylinder she was afraid to name and kicked her feet farther apart into a wider stance. A stance for sparring. He positioned himself across from her on the spongy ground and flipped a switch on his own scarred looking hilt. It ignited with a thump and Rey’s breath caught in her chest at the sight of it. She’d only seen it from a distance before, when it cleaved Unkar Plutt down the middle. Closer, it was even more terrifying. The blade was long and impossibly bright, two small cross blades glowing at the shaft. He nodded to her and indicated her own hilt. She flipped the switch and nearly dropped the thing.

Where his was red and chaotic, hers was blue and as steady as the cloudless sky. She waved it slowly in front of her, marveling at the strange whirring of it as it cut through the thick air. He gave her another moment of silent awe before squaring his shoulders and poising for a strike. She readied herself as well as she was able and lunged first.

* * *

 

That night she ate her dinner with a bandaged hand. After getting an idea of what two swords made of light felt like when they clashed, she had finally begun to understand the possible meaning behind mundane weeks of focus and control. But with a weapon in her hand and a target that thought the same way she did, she felt much more purposeful than when she stacked rocks endlessly without her hands. She used that same measure of control to anticipate his steps and to memorize his complicated footwork. She had earned a burn to her hand, but his bicep sported an angry looking welt as well.

After dinner, she waited in her room for Kylo Ren to snuff the candles. Once the line of light vanished from around the hanging pelt, she pushed it aside and walked confidently to his bed. He was still standing beside it and flinched in surprise when she placed her hands on him. She caught him as he was tugging off his shirt and reached to help him.

“Rey--” he began, but she silenced him with soft fingers at his lips. He crumpled to the bed then, taking her with him in a clumsy jumble of limbs. She wore less clothing this time, nothing more than a short, thin shift she had found among the scattered things in her room.

He rolled her beneath him, settling his warm weight on her as he pressed a muscular thigh between hers. His large hands found her face and explored it much the same as she had the night before, though he had seen her plainly enough these past weeks. She leaned into his touch and nipped and sucked at his fingers when they reached her mouth. He groaned and his thigh shifted against her. This friction sent a shock up her spine and she felt herself grow hot and wet against him.

“Kylo Ren,” she whispered into the dark above her, arching to find his mouth with hers. He jerked away from her at her soft words, however, and instead buried his face in her hair, fanning hot breaths over her scalp. She felt suddenly like she had said the wrong thing, though she didn’t know how that could be.

She’d only said his name.

He rolled off of her, settling along her side and setting his lips to her temple. He was still for a long time in the black of the cave, before his voice, hard and strained, rumbled from him.

He told her a story of a great Jedi knight, the greatest the galaxy had ever known. He told her of the Jedi’s secret bride and of the quiet happiness they found behind closed doors. As his chest hummed and vibrated with his slow though deliberate words, Rey felt herself being lulled to sleep. The story seemed to end queerly, she thought, as she drifted off. A happy announcement of a pregnancy, but little else.

Like he was leaving an important moment of the plot unsaid.

* * *

 

The next night, Rey led with her mouth. She barely waited for the lights to flicker out before going to him, before tugging him to her. His mask was still on and she clawed at it, felt the mechanism of it move under her fingers as he helped to pull it from his head. It made a dull thud as it fell to the ground beside their feet and Rey tangled her fingers in that long, slick hair, tugged and pulled and kissed him.

She’d felt before how soft his lips were beneath her fingers, but against her own, there was all the more give between them. Their teeth clacked painfully together, but neither seemed to care. Kylo Ren pulled her up into his arms and she wrapped her legs around his waist. He turned, sidestepping the bed and pinning her against the wall. The hard impact knocked the air out of her, the soft hissing breath morphing into a moan as he ground himself against her.

His name was on her lips as his mouth trailed from hers to bite at her neck, but she bit the plea back. She didn’t want this to end, didn’t want the man who hated the name Kylo Ren to pull away from her. Not again. She rolled against him, arching herself off the wall and into the press of his body. He was hard and his skin damp with sweat. Rey ran her tongue up the thick column of his neck, tasting this tang and salt. When he pinned her wrists to the gritty stone wall, she moaned into the sweet pain of it. He held her there like he was afraid she would run from him, but it had been he who had taken every step backwards, always she that had advanced.

But she let him keep her, a longing sigh fanning wet over his cheek as he thrust again against her core. She wouldn’t leave; surely he knew that. Still, if it meant he would continue to move against her, if it meant feeling even the most incomplete of caresses against her aching sex, she would let him bracket her to the wall with durasteel manacles.

She felt pulled into him, intermingled and dissolved. How could she feel so swept away by a man whose face she’d never seen? A noise, raw and unreserved, sobbed out of her as he gathered both her wrists into one large hand and reached to tug aside her underwear. She wanted him. She wanted him so badly.

“Yes--” she muttered as he fumbled almost painfully against her. “Yes, please.”

He was tugging down his own rough hewn pants, and she hooked one of her heels into the waistband to help drag them down his backside. She couldn’t see him, but she could feel him. She didn’t know the color of his eyes, but she knew the taste of his mouth, the weight of his fear. She had no idea the shade of his skin, but she knew that beneath her hands, he was beautiful. He found more sense in fighting than he did in meditation, and he enjoyed romantic stories. His voice drew her to him and his screams bound her in place beside him. He’d taken her from a place where she knew nothing but the blinding, unforgiving glare of a desert sun, and taught her what her body wanted in the damp dark. Jakku was nothing but the hot sting of broken promises; Dagobah, and the man who brought her there, kept every vow that was made.

When he pushed into her, she was so slick, so aching that tears filled her eyes. She felt as if she were inside him as well, as if she could feel his razor sharp pleasure as sure as she could feel her own. She felt both crushed against a wall and as if she were holding all that she desired against it. The Force, he had called it, and she thought that was what this was. A force, a shove; not a choice but a command. Magnets. Science.

Magic.

He was calling her name as he drove into her and she wished, _she wished so badly_ that she knew what to call him that would make him feel what she felt. Not to see him, but to know him. But all she had was a name he carried as a penance, and she hoped her cries of release named him well enough.

* * *

 

“Tell me the end of the story,” she said as she lay her head on his chest.

“Mmm?” He was trailing lazy fingers up her spine, his voice thick and deep. They’d made their way to the bed eventually. He’d trailed kisses up and down her bruised and scraped back until she was shaking beneath him, and he had eased into her while she still laid on her belly, rocking them both into a second, more languid peak. Now he was stretched out beside her, dozing in the cool, damp air.

“About the Jedi and his bride. I know that wasn’t the end. No life draped in that many secrets ever ends happily.”

His fingers stilled on her back and Rey found that she was holding her breath.

“You’re right; it wasn’t.”

He was silent again for a long time, and she thought he meant to simply not tell her the truth. Eventually, he pulled her snugly back against him, his arm heavy at her waist and his breath hot in her hair. “She died. The knight made a bargain for her life and she died anyway.”

“A bargain?”

“With a...powerful lord. A Sith who used the Dark Side. They promised her safety, and yet…”

Rey curled more tightly into him. “I guess it just shows that anyone can break a promise, even powerful lords or the Force itself.”

He pulled her closer to him and kissed the back of her neck until she was arching in his arms. “I suppose you’re right.”

* * *

 

They woke to blaster fire. Shrieking blasts hit the marshy ground in muffled thumps and the forest beyond the opening of the cave flashed in violent green explosions. Kylo Ren bolted from the bed, his back to Rey as he fumbled for his weapon. He was silhouetted in flashes of green and Rey realized she could see more of him now than she ever had. She knew she should look away, that he had asked to not be seen and she should respect that, but as the world lit up with explosion after explosion, showing more and more tinted flashes of him to her, she found she couldn’t look away. A particularly close blast jarred her, and she was fumbling for her clothes and a weapon of her own when he ignited his saber and turned toward her.

His naked body was cast in the sparking red light of his saber, pale and broadly muscled and welted with the scars she had only ever felt, never seen. And his face. The world was crashing down around her and there were screeching TIE fighters overhead, but his face stopped her dead. He was looking so fiercely at her, demanding that she see every inch of what he worked so hard to hide. His eyes and hair were dark; his skin was pale.

She’d never let him put his mask on again.

“What’s happening?” she yelled over the roar of the blasts and the ringing in her ears.

“The First Order.” He glanced over his shoulder to the cave opening. “They’ve found me.”

“Who?”

“It doesn’t matter.” He turned back to her, crouched and threw a random article of clothing to her. “Get dressed. We have to leave. Now.”

She scrambled to cobble together some semblance of an outfit, made of her own shift and pants of his that she had to roll and cinch ridiculously to keep in place. He’d thrown on what clothes he was able to find as well--only trousers and boots--his saber still lit and ready in his hand. He tossed Rey her own and she ignited the blue blade with shaking hands.

“Where are we going?” she asked once he pulled her to the entrance of the cave. Now that she could see him, she couldn’t stop looking. She knew they were in danger, but she couldn’t look away. She heard the distant shouts of more voices dampened by modulators and realized that Kylo Ren’s own mask was till tossed aside in the cave.

“Someplace far away.” His gaze was still cast out in the forest, though he looked tensed to sprint out into the waning night at any moment. “I’ll keep you safe, Rey. I promise.”

She didn’t know if she could believe him. His bedtime stories were based on broken promises and as the forest caught flame around them, ships wailing overhead, she wondered if he had broken a few of his own.

The blaster fire and the voices of the soldiers were getting closer. She could see them now, in stark white armour that reflected the blasts from the ships. They carried guns and looked like death itself: white skulls and black, absent eyes.

“Do you trust me?” he yelled.

She shouldn’t. “I do.”

He looked down at her, grabbed her hand and laid a hard kiss to her knuckles that was more teeth than lips. She felt as though she could never see enough of those dark eyes lit in fire and destruction. She wondered what he looked like standing full in the sun. “The ship’s that way. Come on.”

He tugged her behind him, and she stumbled momentarily over the uneven ground.

“Wait!” she called as a flaming tree fell dangerously close. This caught the soldiers’ attention and they started firing. Kylo Ren deflected their shots back at them with his saber, knocking them from their feet and buying he and Rey a scant moment.

He turned to her, fear and determination tightening his features.

“What’s your name?” she asked.

He didn’t hesitate this time; he didn’t blink.

“It’s Ben.”

**Author's Note:**

> Please take a moment and let me know what you thought! I appreciate and welcome any and all feedback!!


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